Many computer software applications, such as word processors, image editors, spreadsheets, email clients, and the like, include a help facility to aid users in performing discrete operations and/or comprehensive tasks in the application. Help facilities come in many different forms including wizards, which present a sequence of steps for a user to perform to accomplish a particular task, context-sensitive help systems, which automatically display help topics relevant to the current state of the application, and conventional text-based help systems which present a user with an index that can be manually searched to look for a help topic of interest.
FIG. 1 shows a screenshot of a help facility for Adobe Acrobat®—an application for viewing, editing and creating documents in the Portable Document Format (PDF). As shown in FIG. 1, a user of the Acrobat application would be presented with a window 100 within a graphical user interface (GUI) that includes a menu bar 104 providing access to various drop-down menus, various graphical buttons 103 that, when selected, place the application in different modes and/or provide the user with access to different tools, and a workspace 105 for displaying sub-windows containing PDF documents. In this screenshot, the workspace 105 includes two sub-windows—one to display a PDF document 102 (manual.pdf), which for example the user is viewing or editing, and another window to display a PDF document 106 (Acrohelp.pdf), which is a guide containing the help information for the application. The user may invoke the help system, thereby bringing up the help document 102, by selecting the Help menu item on the menu bar 104.
Once opened, the user can navigate the help guide using various different mechanisms. For example, the user can scroll through the help guide as if reading a book by using the scrolling controls 113 for the window 106. Alternatively, the user can select a particular bookmark, such as “Annotating PDF Documents” bookmark 108, which will cause a corresponding help page 110 to be presented to the user. The user also can jump to desired locations within the help guide by selecting (e.g., clicking on) links with a help page, such as link 112 in page 110. The link 112 points to another page (for example, “Using the annotation tools”) within the help guide and, upon being clicked, causes that page to be displayed in the window 106. In any event, the user can peruse the help guide to gather information about how to use various features of the application to perform operations and tasks.